Nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media is on an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort called The Truth About Tech. The ad campaign in 55,000 American public schools will aim to educate students, parents and teachers about the dangers of technology and social media induced depression.

“The Truth About Tech campaign isn’t anti-tech, Common Sense founder and CEO Jim Steyer told Observer in an email. “It’s for tech that’s for kids. But there’s plenty of evidence that tech is changing the nature of our interpersonal relationships, and it’s time for a national conversation about that—among families, schools, and the industry.”

Parents and mental health experts have called on tech companies to reduce marketing to children. YouTube Kids and Facebook’s Messenger Kids have come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks.

Common Sense found that the average teenager uses online media nine hours per day, while tweens are exposed up to six hours a day.

Digital music has hit the roof, so Best Buy is officially pulling the plug on music CDs, and another Target may soon be next. Although CDs remain a relatively popular format worldwide, sales in the U.S. dropped more than 18% last year, prompting Best Buy to drop the format entirely.

Digital music sales overtook physical format sales in 2015, and that trend is likely to continue. Paid subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music are experiencing substantial growth, increasing by more than 60% in 2017.

Billboard is reporting that the retailer has informed music suppliers that it will stop selling CDs and pull them from shelves on July 1. Although Best Buy used to be the top music seller in the U.S., nowadays its CD sales generate a relatively low $40 million per year.

Best Buy will continue to carry vinyl for the next two years, keeping a commitment it made to vendors. The vinyl will now be merchandised with the turntables, sources suggest.

Sources say that Target has demanded to music suppliers that it wants to be sold on what amounts to a consignment basis. Currently, Target takes the inventory risk by agreeing to pay for any goods it is shipped within 60 days, and must pay to ship back unsold CDs for credit. With consignment, the inventory risk shifts back to the labels.

Share this:

Like this:

Next-Generation Batteries

The newest developments show that using sodium, zinc, and aluminum constructed batteries make the mini-grid a solid possibility for providing 24-7, reliable and clean energy to entire small rural towns.

2-D Materials

New materials such as Graphene are emerging and are going to change the world forever. Think about the Bronze Age…the Iron Age—these newest materials each contain a single layer of atoms and are two-dimensional. The potential positive impacts of evolving materials are limitless and bound only to the reach of scientists and how far they choose to push.

Autonomous Transportation

Self-driving cars are already in the here-and-now, but just how soon will be helping to improve the lives of handicapped and elderly will change the quality of life for millions.

Personal AI

From your own personal robot assistant that can anticipate your every need and perform tasks at your whim, to entire AI environments—this could be affordable to everyone with the emerging availability of Open AI ecosystems.

There’s unsurety as to what the Government is doing with the images. They say, Facial-recognition systems may indeed speed up the boarding process, however, the real reason they are cropping up in U.S. airports is that the government wants to keep better track of who is leaving the country, by scanning travelers’ faces and verifying those scans against photos it already has on file. The idea is that this will catch fake passports and make sure people aren’t overstaying their visas. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has partnered with airlines including JetBlue and Delta to introduce such recognition systems at New York’s JFK International Airport, Washington’s Dulles International, and airports in Atlanta, Boston, and Houston, among others. It plans to add more this summer.

“As It Searches for Suspects, the FBI May Be Looking at You”). Privacy advocates also point out that research has shown the technology to be less accurate with older photos and with images of women, African-Americans, and children (see “Is Facial Recognition Accurate? Depends on Your Race”).

Microsoft Research is developing technology which may end up in the next version Microsoft’s classroom software. In a recent publication, Microsoft Research describes an AI-driven system which could help teachers automatically assess reading performance for students, saving them time and allowing more individual attention to students who need it the most. Their research paper, “Automatic Evaluation of Children Reading Aloud on Sentences and Pseudo words,” automatically predicts the overall reading aloud ability of primary school children (6-10 years old), based on the reading of sentences and pseudo words.

Like this:

Google Hire allows employers post job listings, then accept and manage applications, according to job listing links spotted by Axios reader Colin Heilbut. So far, several tech companies seem to be using (or testing) Google Hire, including Medisas, Poynt, DramaFever, SingleHop, and CoreOS. Google has assured, that “Only information that a candidate voluntarily provides would be passed to a prospective employer as part of their online application.”